No more tax
rant by Matthew Arnison
February 1999
sick of tax? which tax? the money tax you pay to the government if you
have a job? or the time tax you pay to the telly stations if you watch a
show?
have you ever caught yourself saying "i never seem to have enough time
anymore." myself, i find it hard to fit everything in my life that i want
to do. spending time with the people i love, relaxing, being creative,
earning money for a roof and some food. all these things important to my
life, they take time.
i don't like being forced to pay time tax.
as john perry barlow says
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.html
Broadcast media [are] supported ... by selling the attention of
their audience to advertisers
TV stations aren't selling you stuff to pay for their programs. they're
selling advertisers your attention to pay for their programs. so the
programs better give the advertisers your attention. means it's no good
trying to sell your attention to a car ad, if it clashes with a show that
criticises cars. and car makers, being some of the biggest companies on
the planet, have a lot of money to spend on getting your attention.
now this time tax is a huge tax, and more insidious than government tax.
it affects all of us that watch, read or listen to the commercial media.
the ads alone are atleast a 25% tax on our time. if the average person
watches 10 hours of telly a week, that's two and a half hours every week
paid in time tax, which is one whole year of your life if you live until
you're seventy. think what you could do if you had that year back!
but the taxed time is not just in the ads, it's also in the subversion of
the entertainment we were after when we switched the box on - the info is
never going to be too askew with the ads that support it, so the info is
polluted to suit. both the ads and the info are massaged so you don't
realise that you're being taxed, and never notice how much you've been
taxed, or that the tax was in both the ads and the show.
it also taxes our creativity, because the largest media make the most
profits by being cheap. cheap means going national or international,
reducing the pool of creativity. cheap for advertisers means they try and
make their homogenous stuff seem suitable for as many different people as
possible. so that means you are encouraged to buy more homogenous stuff,
rather than finding your own creative solutions to problems or expressing
your diversity.
many people dodge government taxes, and complain about tax rates rising as
you get paid more. what is perhaps more worthy of our complaint is that so
many hours that we spend enjoying the media, which these days pretty much
defines our cultural lives, are subject to this hidden time tax. and it
taxes not just money, but things sometimes more important to our quality
of life: our energy, creativity, diversity, attention and time.
fortunately, the time tax collector is easily dismissed. just turn off
your telly.